[reaperducer]

I don't think it's fair to call it myopic. That implies that one method is correct and the other is wrong. It's more of a cultural difference.

While South Korea has largely embraced the Western style of instant gratification hyper consumerism, Japan is more nuanced. And IMO, that's a good thing.

There is value in scarcity, and in context. It's OK if a publisher doesn't want its work distributed around the world for everyone to see. It's that publisher's property. Having to travel to Japan to see, read, or hear certain things is a good thing. If every thing and every experience was available everywhere, there would be no point in travel.

Having ramen in a hole-in-the-wall ramen shop beneath the train tracks in Japan is a different experience than having ramen in Japantown Los Angeles.

When my wife goes to Japan, she brings an small empty suitcase to ship home just for the books, magazines, and music she can't get here.

It's like artists who destroy their work after a show. Scarcity increases the object's value to some. And it's the artist's choice to do so, not the audience's.

I know this is an unpopular view, especially in tech circles, but you don't have a right to consume every piece of media ever created in every region around the world all the time.

[Quarrelsome]

> but you don't have a right to consume every piece of media ever created in every region around the world all the time.

Oh you do. Artists and general creatives often tumble into the trap of thinking they can control the spread of their work following public release. You cannot control the zeitgeist of a generation. If your work is popular than the moment you print it, its spread is out of your hands. IP, copyright and legal action are lossy mechanisms that work against the prevailing system. I'm not saying they don't have value (they very much do!) but when your product is consumer-grade content that don't have infrastructure you own baked into its operation you'll find your stuff being obtained illegally if you don't make it available legally and quickly.

I've seen break-dancers expect to be able to have exclusive rights to movement into perpetuity enforced by community-driven shaming tactics (doesn't work) and I've read enough scanlations to know that the Japanese approach to print manga is negligent of the ramifications of globalisation. When you publish, its gone. You have to be more prepared at publish time in the modern era.

[tauwauwau]

Just going to leave it here. Seems relevant

Planet Money: Joke Theft https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/06/710404524/epis...

[zyx321]

As Gabe Newell once said, piracy is a service problem. The only way to cut back on illegal copying is by making the legal way more convenient.

[Jasper_]

And yet when another company copies API documentation, HN calls for lynching their heads [0]. It seems the hacker crowd only has respect for copyright protections for work that they identify with. Protections for the eniineers and startups, but not the artists.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19719380

[plorkyeran]

The end result of refusing to provide your manga in digital form is not that people only consume it in the form you intended. Somewhat the opposite, in fact. Instead you simply have people scanning everything that gets published and distributing it for you, with you having zero say in the resulting quality.

For niche self-published works sold at conventions the number of illegal downloads is often dramatically higher than the total number of physical copies that exist, and the people who experience your art in its intended form are a minority.

[deogeo]

> you don't have a right to consume every piece of media ever created in every region around the world all the time.

According to the first sale doctrine, you do. If someone buys media in Japan, then brings them back to the US (i.e. imports them), and sells them, that's entirely legal, and there's nothing the copyright owner can do about it.

And looking beyond what the law currently is, to perhaps what it should be, copyright should remunerate creators for copies of their works, not allow them to impose censorship, which is exactly what limiting distribution this way is.

[klibertp]

> It's OK if a publisher doesn't want its work distributed around the world for everyone to see.

> And it's the artist's choice to do so, not the audience's.

There's a (not) very subtle contradiction in these two sentences.

In short: yay for authors' rights, forever and ever! but I probably couldn't care less about the leeches^W publishers.

The faster the publishing industry - perpetually stuck in the 15th century and trying way too hard to bring us all back to that time - is brought down in flames and replaced the better.

[Jasper_]

Did you misread the parent comment? One statement is positive towards publisher's rights, the other is positive towards authors rights.

[klibertp]

The first statement says the works of art belong to publishers ("...doesn't want its work..."), while the second implies that it's the authors who have full rights to their work ("...it's the artist's choice to do so..."). So, which is it?

[YeGoblynQueenne]

To be more precise, you may not have the right but you do have the opportunity, when it comes to manga and anime. I don't know how feriociously japanese publishers pursue copyright offenders overseas but there certainly is a great number of unofficial translations online most of which seem to be made by people in the US and Europe.

Of course, the translations (and the scans) are often a bit crap. But you can still get an idea of the original's quality.

[cblades]

>There is value in scarcity

I'd argue that for easily digitized works, there's no such thing as scarcity.

Certainly publishers have the right to sue and limit legal distribution, but it does seem at least naive for them to believe they can control illegal distribution. Perhaps that's not the rationale; maybe it's a purely principled stance.

Nevertheless, their work will be spread digitally, and it seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face to not have some legal form of distribution that the publisher can make money from.

[jimrhods23]

"I'd argue that for easily digitized works, there's no such thing as scarcity."

Since AI can't create great pieces of art or digital works in a short amount of time, there still is scarcity.

[nxrabl]

What you seem to be arguing for is the scarcity of artists, rather than of art.

[cblades]

I meant that for existing works of art that are easily digitized (not created, taken from a physical format to a digital one), there is no such thing as scarcity if the consumers don't strongly prefer the physical version to the digital version.

[pattisapu]

Speaking of scarcity, valuing it, and protecting it, it seems that physical media, like CDs for music are, or were, more popular in Japan than other places [1].

Is the situation in South Korea similar or different? I don't know enough about either; just thinking out loud.

[1] http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/japan-cd-sales/